A = B: An Enquiry into the Upanishads' Basic Insight (An Old and Rare Book)

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"THE Sum and substance of the Upanishad teaching, the great Surendranath Dasgupta wrote, is involved in the equation Atman Brahman ".1 Paul Deussen already opined likewise. It would not be prudent to question the validity of a statement which is thus backed by eminent authorities. But it is permissible to try and penetrate the meaning of this aphorism. To do so afresh one must go back to the sources: read the texts, analyse them minutely and mutually interpret them.

Given the objective, the procedure imposes itself. If one is to determine the import of the formula AB, then one must begin by establishing the meaning of A, then of B, independently of one another. There will remain to explain the equation, conveyed by the sign =. This we do in the first two essays of the present collection. The article 'Atman in the Early Upanishads' has appeared earlier in the Research Journal of Philosophy, and so has the one entitled 'The Identification of Brahman as Atman'. Prof. R. S. Srivastava, D.Litt., Head of the Department of Philosophy, Ranchi University, and Editor of the above Journal, will find here the expression of our gratitude for kindly permitting us to reproduce these two articles.

If the textual exegesis we have adopted as method somewhat savours of the laboratory, the latter does have two open windows. The first gives a vista on the historical context: it situates the texts in the great 'cultural revolution' which saw the Upanishads being substituted for the Vedic Samhitas and Brahmanas: introspective reflection on the self-supplanting ritualistic concern with the sacrifice. Through the other window a fresh breeze disperses the dust of rigid philosophical concepts, which centuries of interpretation have overlaid the original texts with. Instead it brings the living notions of the 'sacred' and 'immortality' to illumine the catchwords of brahman and atman respectively.